By Sheila MarikarNEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE • Sunday October 27, 2013 5:19 AM

NEW YORK — A little after 4 p.m. on a recent Thursday, the head of strategy for the
content-marketing firm Mash+Studio gathered his co-workers for happy hour.

In the Manhattan conference room, Eric Fleming and the others arranged a makeshift bar on a
table: a liter of Sprite, a tray of cucumber slices, lemon slices, a bottle of Pimm’s and glasses.
After mixing drinks, they started chatting.

Fleming, 31, turned to Jenni Hayward, who oversees business development, to ask whether the Ace
Hotel in Shoreditch, the trendy hotel chain’s British locale, was close to opening.

Hayward, 25, was not in Manhattan, but at Mash’s partner firm in London. Thanks to Beam, a
5-foot-tall video conferencing robot, her presence was being broadcast in New York.

The occasion might sound like an outtake from
The Office, but some happy hours are moving from the corner pub to the cloud. With
companies increasingly working with employees who are spread across states and continents, such
arrangements have become a way to foster workplace bonding.

“We feel like we know them because we have these sessions,” Samantha Schlaifer, Mash’s head of
production, said of her London co-workers, many of whom she has never met in person.

“We get their personalities, what makes them laugh. We can have inside jokes.”

Down the hall from Mash’s offices, Shake, a startup that has made a smartphone app to create
legal documents, holds regular happy hours with its lead mobile engineer, Ricky Hussmann, who is
based in Morgantown, W.Va.

He plugs in to Google Hangout and a 24-inch monitor that broadcasts his presence to the
office.

Many Fridays culminate in the enjoyment of beers and the exploration of YouTube videos, part of
a running competition for who can find the funniest thing online.

“It’s a nice separation from the daily grind,” Hussmann said.

Some companies bring in bonding activities beyond drinks. At Mixbook, a company in Palo Alto,
Calif., that creates custom photo books, employees engage in monthly parties in which local and
remote staff members from places as far-flung as Thailand and Siberia log in at the same time to
play a video game.

Another company has embraced virtual happy hours in a lower-tech (and higher-end) way. One
Friday, four co-workers at the recipe blog the Kitchn shook up and photographed concoctions such as
a gin fizz infused with black mission figs.

“We’re often sipping cocktails on Friday afternoon anyway, so we thought we might as well make
it a thing,” said Faith Durand, the Kitchn’s executive editor, who is based in Columbus. They
discussed the drinks on Gchat, Google’s instant messaging service, and invited readers to “
join."

Virtual happy hours are also catching on in higher education. Lindsay Chason organizes them for
her classmates pursuing a master’s in business administration through the University of North
Carolina’s online degree program.

Once a month or so, Chason, 30, relaxes in the den of her Atlanta home with her computer and a
glass of red wine. She logs in to the same type of video chat room used for lectures and waits for
her friends to dial in.